Agreed!
The weekend after my university received the tape of Unix 7th Edition
(to upgrade the 6th Edition system I ran there), I read the entire
kernel source from beginning to end. If a program could be a thing
of beauty, this was it; I've seen nothing quite like it in the 20
years since (and I've seen a lot of code, including some later versions
of Unix). Yes, by today's standards the identifiers were short and
the comments sparse, but the shear clarity of its construction made
them unnecessary. It all fell together like a single, extended
thought.
But in terms of features, Unix 7th Edition would simply suck compared
to Linux. And parts of the Linux kernel (I don't claim to have read all
of it) achieve a similar level of clarity. But hundreds of developers
spread around the world can hardly produce the seamless code of two
developers who spent long hours together at adjacent terminals. So we
really can't expect Linux to have Research Unix's coherency and elegance.
But we can strive to better what we have.
There is much strength in our numbers. Our many viewpoints brings us
a larger space of solutions to bear on each problem. But we have to
be conscious of our weaknesses. There is a genuine danger that the
Linux kernel will become harder and harder to develop because of the
many different (and not necessarily compatible) ideas behind it. It
isn't that folks like Linus will no longer be able to understand and
work with the kernel confidently, but it will be harder for the rest
of us to "get it right." Yet "making the kernel easier for new folks
to understand" isn't exactly a priority. This could be our Achilles
Heel...
-Ed
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/